Shrikant Kathane

Now leading and transforming Global Marketplace team in the new era of Agentic/AI transformation. Global Marketplace is Walmart’s third‑party commerce platform, connecting sellers to millions of customers across categories while leveraging Walmart’s scale, trust, and omni‑channel reach. Marketplace platforms enable third-party sellers, and internal teams to deliver seamless digital and physical commerce experiences, supported by Walmart Global Tech’s data, platform, and AI capabilities.  My team, within Walmart Global Tech AI and Data org, builds and operates the platforms that make this possible—enabling real‑time decision‑making, personalizing seller focused applications, and the next generation of AI‑driven and agent‑enabled systems. We build with a people‑led, tech‑empowered mindset, focused on reliability, trust, and long‑term sustainability.

Led multiple core distributed global data engineering teams (Marketplace, eCommOps, Online Pickup & Delivery/OPD, Labs) for Walmart US eCommerce. Powered double-digit growth in Walmart US eCommerce and Marketplace through platform and systems expansion; scaled team to 100+ people. Built technical product and operational processes to support peak retail events like Black Friday aka holidays. Served as primary escalation point in leadership forums for business updates, cross-org programs, and engineering/operational excellence. Marketplace supported Global Marketplace Acceleration across 14+ tracks with core datasets (Seller Backbone/360, Risk, Performance, Growth, Payments, etc.), improving seller risk profile, enabling AI use cases (Marty/WALSA), and accelerating time-to-market. eCommOps enabled Walmart US eCommerce with core datasets in Orders/OMS and consolidated assets. Delivered a flagship near real-time Insights platform integrating cross-domain, sensitive data to track holiday performance for executive leadership. OPD enabled 4700+ stores in Walmart US with online pickup, global fulfillment/GIF and core store datasets for daily decisions and process optimization. Built an internal Labs team driving technical innovation, platform leadership via Tech/Domain Forums, and developed leaders that grew across the org. Championed engineering and operational excellence, driving continuous cost optimization for production-grade data platforms at Walmart scale. Collaborated cross-functionally with senior engineering, product, and program leaders to improve ways-of-working, increase speed, and drive business impact. Strengthened team culture with AES scores of 91% Engagement, 90% Belonging, 97% Intent to Stay, and 95% Integrity, while building a strong leadership bench. Co-led the pilot phase of the Agentic AI journey by defining use cases, members to core AI team, building an org-wide adoption tracker, and partnering with the Chief Architect on executive demos.

+Led Data Analytics Platform team with 3 verticals - Workplace, Retail, and Data & ML Ops - responsible for the enterprise-wide Data Analytics and Analytics Infrastructure. +Led multi-year technical roadmaps architecting the vision and modernization of Data Analytics Platform with the development of enterprise-wide Data Lake, establishment and the migration of enterprise data warehouse to Redshift, and rollout of Tableau infrastructure. +Developed enterprise-grade batch and streaming data ingestion pipelines using AWS and open-source technologies in the areas of Customer Analytics, Marketing Analytics, Financial and Operational Analytics – delivering high-quality business outcomes. +Led the system integration efforts for data teams during acquisition and merger; developed key data products – a 360-degree view of the customer, Campaign Performance, KPI and National Advisor Center, and data sets for the retail business to create targeted, data-driven business efforts. +Collaborated with data scientists and ML team to build actionable models for marketing efforts increasing click-to-conversion rates and leads phone call optimization efforts. +Reinvented ML Ops infrastructure for developing and productizing the ML models using SageMaker Studio reducing the data science model development from 6 months to 2+months. +Established DataOps culture with security, cost, and operational excellence OKRs, creating monitoring systems to track the data quality, data pipeline health. +Built a diversified high performing team by hiring data engineers, data architects, AWS dev ops engineers, business analysts and assisted in building an organization size of 20+ people. Technical Skills: AWS Solutions Architect, Redshift, Glue, Lambda, SageMaker, S3, EC2, RDS, Airflow, Python, Advanced SQL, Salesforce, Tableau, Informatica, Snaplogic, API Integration, OAuth2, Terraform, Ansible, AWS CICD stack, API Gateway, Git.

+Led multiple two-pizza agile teams in areas of Application, Analytics, CRM, and Partner Integration areas. +Analytics team - Led the Analytics team on the enterprise-level rollout of Corporate Dashboard using Tableau, procured licenses, worked with execs for funding, and built a 40-person cross-functional user community for dashboard development. Architected the vision and roadmap of the Data Analytics platform, led team members on vendor evaluation and prototypes. Procured Netezza/IBM PureData and implemented data ingestion from all data sources- web, email, print, transaction, phone; resulting in developing the foundational platform for key insights for reducing churn. +Partner Integration team - I built a geographically distributed software development team (1 Manager, 6 team members in Boston), delivering product enhancements for all 3rd party financial institutions, transformed the legacy monolith application to the latest technology stack. +Growth/Enrollment team - optimized first-use flow user experience to increase enrollment, received rave reviews from product management for high quality and timely delivery of the new product. +Planner Experience team - directly managed 5-person Salesforce development team, procured Informatica for data integration. +Championed efforts transitioning teams on agile software development techniques and test-driven development. Collaborated with the engineering and product leadership on strategic initiatives by developing and aligning the technical roadmap with product strategy.

+Built infrastructure and an internal tool platform from ground-up that helped reduce regression testing cycle from 4-weeks to 2-days! +Led a team of 20 engineers (US – 8 members & India – 12 members) responsible for tool platform development and ensuring high quality on core data exchange and trading platforms.

+Built a global (US – 4 members & India – 6 members) development team - Automation Tools group – responsible for innovation in Software Release processes. +Architected an end-to-end internal Automation Tools platform using J2EE technologies - Java, Struts, Spring, Hibernate, SQL Server - executed across 50 virtual machines.

+Built data integration platform using Java, Struts, Spring, and Hibernate technologies integrating data from America's top 401K providers partners including Fidelity Investments, Vanguard, JP Morgan, etc.

+At GE Power Systems, Greenville, SC, worked as the lone onsite engineer worked with Implementation Management group and customers directly using C++/Visual C++ and Sybase.

+At Wipro Systems Hyderabad, worked as part of offshore team member of GE Power Systems as System Engineer using C++/Visual C++, Sybase.